Scope of our current project

We've had a few questions about the scope of work for the renovation, so I thought I'd provide some more detail beyond just posting a floor plan.

The old (very small) 2-piece washroom is being relocated to where the butler's pantry was. This 2-piece was actually added to the house sometime in the last 50 years and the space was originally a servant's staircase that went up to meet the landing between first and second floors of the house.  We're also moving a stair case in the kitchen extension to be in line with the entry into the back rec room rather than perpendicular to it.

The stairs to the basement in the corner of the kitchen are being relocated to under the stairs to the second level.  This removes one of the entry/exit points in the kitchen so we can maximize space.

This picture shows the various walls that are being opened up in the main house.  The wall between the kitchen and dining room will be framed in the same way as the pocket doors between the dining room and living room so that we keep with the style of the house.  The relocated 2-piece washroom will be removed, along with the stairs to the basement to provide an additional 30 square feet of space in the kitchen.  We are also combining the sunroom with the kitchen to form one large open kitchen/sunroom space so that we can have an eat-in area and bring more light into the kithen.  We spent a lot of time trying to figure out how much we wanted to open up the kitchen areas to adjacent rooms.  We live in a 100 year-old house where the original kitchen was quite small and segregated from the rest of the main floor.  We wanted to balance the desire of keeping to the old style of the house while giving us a larger, more modern kitchen, with eat-in space and lots of light.

Here's the finished floor plan again:

There are a few things that I think are worth mentioning:

The old swinging door between pantry and dining room is being closed to make the space between the kitchen and new bathroom into a floor to ceiling pantry.

The window in the corner of the kitchen is being changed to be 10" shorter, but shifted upwards in the existing window opening, so that it will be above the kitchen counter top.

The back rec room which has been in a mostly demolished state for the past 2.5 years will be rebuilt.  The grandfathered plumbing for the old bathroom that was in the building will be upgraded to provide a laundry room and two piece bathroom. We had originally planned for a shower in this bathroom as well, but opted for laundry.  We will be retaining a drain under the stacked laundry to allow us to convert that space to a 3-piece bathroom at some point in the future if we want.

The back rec room will have a wet-bar/kitchenette area, and a large built-in unit around a gas fireplace on the back wall.  The door to the back yard will be a 13' wide, 8' tall folding sliding door that will allow us to open the entire space to the outdoors.  The rec room will be tiled to make the space amenable to people entering with shoes on without damaging the floor.

The entire lower level of the old sunroom is being rebuilt from the ground up.  The old sunroom was sitting on stacked wood and brick without any real foundation and was in very bad shape.

We will be retaining the upper level sunroom structure as it has way too many windows to replace and already has a nice hardwood floor and isn't in horrible shape.  It will be reinforced so that it is structurally sound, and we will be adding a pair of french doors out to the upper level deck (see next item).  The outside cedar shake skirting will be replaced with new and the roof on top of the sunroom will be replaced (with gutters and downspouts added).

New decks will be added.  One off the sunroom, and one on top of the back rec room/garage building.  They will be connected by stairs.  This will allow us to maximize our outdoor space.  The deck and stair case concrete piers were put in last year when we did some landscaping and are 6' deep with true footings and rebar throughout.

All of the renovated spaces will be upgraded with new insulation, modern electrical and plumbing, and be outfitted with in-floor hydronic heating tied into zones on our high-efficiency boiler (purchased back in 2009).

We are also replacing our side door and landing (not shown in the plans) which exits the house from a landing on the way to the basement.  The door and landing area were in pretty bad shape so we opted to include this in the scope of the work.

The new kitchen will have custom cabinetry up to the ceilng with crown.  We opted for granite countertops.  The range is a new Thermador 48" professional all-gas range with matching 48" hood.  The fridge and freezer are also Thermador and are counter-depth built-ins that are 84" in height.  The dishwasher is a stainless model by Thermador.

Windows throughout the renovated space will be replaced with new Marvin wooden windows with aluminum clad exteriors.  If you've been following the blog for a while, you'll probably remember my efforts to restore the old wood windows.  We decided to abandon our efforts to rebuild the original windows to go for new after realizing the time and effort necessary.  With work, family, and all the other commitments in life, I just don't have the time to take that task on.  The quality of the Marvin windows is excellent and we chose a style that is in keeping with the original windows in our house.

For trim, door and window casings, sills, and architraves, we opted to match the original trim in the house.  During demolition, we managed to salvage some of the original trim which will be re-used.  The remaining will be reproduced with matching knives from a wood mill just south of Ottawa.  We were lucky that most of the knives were available and only had to get one new knife made for the side window and door casing.  The trim isn't cheap to get reproduced but we felt it was important to keep with the original style of the house.

The garage will be turned into an actual garage, with a proper insulated garage door, an adjacent entry door, updated electrical for a workshop area and lots of storage space.

If you're still reading this blog post, then you likely realize that this project has a large scope of work, involves building permits, lots of structural work, electrical, plumbing, and insulating.  This is partly the reason we waited so long to get going on this part of our house renovation, to save the necessary funds and really try to get the design right.  We did use an architect who had some great input on elements of the design, but the overall layout and design is largely ours.

We're excited about the progress so far and we hope you continue to check in to this blog for updates!

More demo

Our back extension is supported by a vertical 2x4 in each corner.  That's it.  Contractor isn't sure why it hasn't fallen down yet...

http://bytownhouse.tumblr.com/post/61120325402/demo-of-the-existing-kitchen-extension-in

Here are some floor plan drawings to show the before and after (and the scope):

Before floor plan:

After floor plan:

And some elevation views of the outside:

And some elevation views of our kitchen:

And some elevation views of our fireplace surround at the back of the new rec room:

Posting a lot of pictures on blogger is a bit of a pain. I've posted some of our photos on tumblr.

See here:

Before shots
More before pictures
After plaster demolition
Partial demo in the garage
An old sink of ours

Stay tuned for more. The contractors are busy with the remaining demolition tasks which I'm hoping wrap up soon. The engineer came by to confirm all the specs for opening walls and rebuilding the kitchen extension. With any luck, by early December we'll have our kitchen back.

And we're back...

This blog has been very quiet over the last two years.  But we've recently embarked on some major renovation changes and I plan to update the blog with our progress.

We've decided to move ahead on the remaining changes to our main floor including expanding and renovating the kitchen, opening the kitchen to both the dining room and kitchen extension, moving the main floor powder room, finishing the back building into part garage and part rec room, some outdoor work including a new roof over the kitchen extension, two decks and replacement of 10 windows and 5 external doors.

I'll post a set of before pictures shortly and then what it looks like now (we've started demolition).  We're very excited to say the least.

Status, wow how time flies

I haven't posted for a while. Life gets busy. I travel for work, have a family I want to spend quality time with, and we've been trying to be more prudent with funds, so the renovations have slowed down.

A very quick status report:
- we still have a large pit in the backyard
- we still have an unfinished back building although it is progressing, just slowly
- we have a new flat roof on the back building (modified bitumen, new roof drains, etc...)
- I've been slowly restoring our wood windows and storms
- we have a neighbour that corners our lot who's trying to develop a 19-unit condo building on a 100 x 130 lot
- we have a new neighbour beside us who is renovating their house (and making much more progress than us it seems)
- we still might have squirrels in our attic
- my post on making wood windows has had 19,000 hits

I've started a tumblr blog so I can at the very least post some photos that I don't have time to blog about here. You can check it out here: http://bytownhouse.tumblr.com

Demolition Complete (for now)

The demolition crew finished the last part of their work for this portion of the project.  We had a concrete demolition company come in to break up the slab under the old coach house.  Here is a picture that gives you an idea of how thick the slab was:

They had a large bobcat with a air pressure jack hammer on it and an additional bulldozer to take away all the chunks of concrete.  My son was very happy with all the ‘diggers’ that came to visit our house:

 

Here are a couple more pictures of the end result.  You can see the open web steel joists supporting the flat roof.  The plan is to pour a concrete footing along the length of the open wall and then reframe it as an external wall.  In the second picture you can see the bathroom area that they jack hammered out while they were here.  The bathroom will be roughed-in at the same time so we can pour a new floor when the footing is poured.

 

We had a first inspection with the city today.  The inspector was very friendly and liked everything he saw today.  He raised a couple small points relating to future parts of our project, but gave us the go-ahead to prepare to pour the footing.  The footing has to have rebar in it that is drilled into the left-over foundation from the coach house.  The inspector will return just prior to pouring, and then again before we backfill our new backyard ‘pit’ to examine frost-proofing that has to be in place around the footing.

More next week once our contractor has prepped the footing and had the plumbing roughed-in for the updated bathroom.

Demolition Progress!

The demolition of the coach house started about a week ago.  Here’s a picture of our first floor showing where the coach house was (red box).  The entire building (2 storeys) was removed and all that remains is the concrete pad it was sitting on.  The orange box in the picture was where our fire escape was.  That was removed also.

In the pictures that follow you can see the various stages of demolition.

In this first picture, taken from my third floor office, you can see the roof of the building.  They’ve just started to take off the roof covering.

Now they’ve removed most of the roof.

The inside first floor of the coach house.  The light streaming through the roof rafters above. 

Roof/second level gone!

Here you can see the bathroom that was built on the side of our current laundry room.  It was very poorly built to accommodate the school’s first female student, probably in the 1970’s when the back buildings were used as an electronics college.

In this picture, you can see the crew’s first big surprise.  You are looking head-on towards a 2 foot tall, 28 foot long steel I-beam!  The crew said that it was likely put in place by a crane.  This was done in the 1940’s when the original coach house was expanded to twice it’s size and this beam supported the entire centre of the building.

Here’s another picture of the beam running through the top of the first floor.

The demo crew cut all the ceiling joists on either side of the beam, as they were preparing to drop it to the ground.

They cut a small notch out of the supporting wood studs under the beam, then tied a chain around the base of the studs and their large truck, then dropped the beam down.  When it dropped, all the car alarms in the neighbourhood went off!

 

The beam down on one side from above.

In this picture, taken from the farthest corner of where the coach house was standing looking back towards our house, you can see the fire escape that was remove, the remaining interior stud wall that connected the coach house to the other outbuildings, our two level enclosed sunroom/laundry room, and the steel I-beam lying on the ground waiting to be removed.

Here’s a similar picture after the outside walls were removed and the first escape was (mostly) taken down.  My son has decided he wants a career in demolition.  (Don’t worry, he was very well supervised).

In this picture, you can see the internal stud wall removed.  You might wonder how we can have a 28' long opening with no support (or maybe you don’t care, but I’ll tell you about it anyway).  The ceiling joists in the remaining structure run back to front and are open steel-web joists 16” high.  The architect and structural engineer were very pleased to see this as they will allow us to have large open spaces in the interior, and an upper level deck with no additional support. Yey!

A picture of the back part of the open space, where the old furnace closet was.  This is now gone too.  You can see a bit more detail of the steel joists here with the dismal old fibreglass insulation.  You can also see how the outer walls of the remaining structure were built.  They consist of an 8” concrete block, an air space (filled in some places by newspaper), and then an inner 4” concrete block.

The latest surprise came on Friday when the concrete demo crew started breaking up the old pad.  Most concrete pads are 4” thick, sometimes 6”.  I had previously sledge-hammered a small hole to around 6” thick so we knew ours was on the thick side.  Imagine their surprise when they broke up a section to find it is 14-16” thick!!  It appears to be two pads, one poured on top of the other with a tar impregnated membrane between the two.  My guess is that the original coach house had the first pad poured sometime in the 1920-1930’s.  When the coach house was expanded and the the other flat-roof structure was built, the second pad was poured.  The concrete demo guys said they needed a better bobcat to break up the pad as the one they started with wasn’t going to do the job right.  So they left and dropped another one off this weekend and will be returning on Monday.

In case you were wondering, in place of the coach house, we will eventually have a yard with gardens and a patio.  I still haven’t scanned our set of plans (they are on large format paper that it not easy to scan) to show you the rest of the planned renovation.  That will come soon!  If you look at the picture at the very top of this post, the basic plan is to have the remaining two rooms become a garage (the one in line with the side of the house), and a recreation room / in-law suite (the one in line with the current laundry room).  We’ll be adding a roof top deck on part of the rear building with French door access from our upper sunroom and stairs down to a lower deck on the side of our current laundry room.  Current laundry room will be restructured and opened to existing kitchen and will become part of the kitchen (an eating area).  Doorway into old attached bathroom will become a door out to the lower level deck.  The side of the rear recreation room now facing our backyard will have a 13.5’ long, 8’ tall,  folding-sliding door to the backyard, allowing us to have an indoor/outdoor space with tons of light.

The city inspector will be coming by early this week to check on demo progress, while the crew removes the rest of the pad and our contractor starts to put a new external wall (with frost-protected footing beneath) on the remaining building.  Then we’ll get going with the gutting of the interior of the remaining buildings.  Fun times!

Building Plans/Permit Approved

It’s been a long process, but we’ve finally got a set of finished drawings, engineering specs, and a building permit from the city for our plans to the back outbuildings.  The demolition of the original coach house will likely start this week, and parts of the framing/structural work will begin after that, then a new flat roof will be put on the remaining structure.

Here’s a summary of our plans…

If you remember (from older posts), we have two buildings at the rear of our property that take up our entire backyard.  The first is a two-level coach house that is (mostly) original to the house.  It measures 30’x24’.  The other, newer structure (1940’s) was built by Carleton College when they owned our house and used it as the Student Union building and it is a double-concrete block walled, single level, flat-roof building that measures 30’x26’.  That structure abuts the coach house and its two rooms and the one on the lower level of the coach house were used as classrooms and as a recreation hall by students.

We are removing the coach house in its entirety and leaving the flat single level structure.  The remaining structure has two large rooms, a bathroom, and two small closets (one for a furnace and one for an industrial electrical panel).  The two large rooms will mostly remain the same, but the one in line with our driveway will become a single-car garage with workshop at the rear, and the other one (inline with our current laundry/mud-room) will become a recreation room with 3-piece bathroom.  One wall of this recreation room will have an 8’ tall x 15’ wide folding sliding door that will open to the new backyard where the coach house was standing.  We will be putting a new flat roof on, and a big roof-top deck as well with stairs leading down to a small deck at ground level.

In addition to these changes, we are moving our laundry to the basement, relocating our mudroom into the front part of the recreation room, and opening our current laundry/mudroom full to our existing kitchen.  We are also opening an 8’ section of wall between the kitchen and dining room to create a more open feel (keeping the look/feel of the traditional trim for that opening), and rebuilding part of the laundry area to accommodate some new windows, a door opening to the backyard area, and a more solid floor.

The project is quite large in scope, but we’re breaking it up into phases that are manageable in scope and cost.  After demolishing the coach house, we will have the wall that used to be between the coach house and remaining building rebuilt to be an external wall and closed up with plywood until next year.  The new roof will be put on this fall with a new roof drain.  The interior of the remaining building will be gutted and if we have the time and budget, we will likely try to get the garage door put on.  That will be it for this year.

Next year, we will do some more work on the garage and recreation room, and start rebuilding the structure for the laundry room.  If there is time and budget available, we will then proceed with opening up the kitchen/laundry area, and kitchen/dining room area.  Decking (both on top of the recreation room and at ground-level) will be done last, likely the following year.

I am in the process of scanning some of the design drawings and as soon as they are done I will be post them up here.  We have decided not to give the project to one large design/build firm as the costs are just too high.  We will be acting as the GC on the project with assistance from our architect when needed.  We will hire people to do most of the demolition work, the roof, electrical and plumbing, and framing/structural work, and we will handle everything else (insulating, drywall, flooring, and finishing touches).

Stay tuned for more updates as this next exciting phase of our house project begins!

Bathroom Teasers

Before:

A couple weeks ago (misc. stages of completion):

We now have the glass tub shield in, the end of the tub tiled, and various other features completed.  I will post more shortly showing the entire room and in better lighting.

The tiles are all marble, the black inlay is granite (12x12 tiles that were taken to a water jet cutting place to be made into 0.5” strips).